Revisiting the Relationship Between Corruption and Press Freedom

We use matching methods to explore the relationship between the control of corruption and press freedom from 1996–2016. We find evidence that increases in the control of corruption significantly elevates press freedom over both the four-year and eight-year horizon. These effects are strongest for the legal and political environment categories of press freedom. However, we find little evidence that press freedom influences the control of corruption overall, hypothesizing that this lack of an effect could be due to the absence of other complementary institutions (e.g., the rule of law and democracy) and/or because we are using perceptions-based corruption measurements. We find some evidence that press freedom, paired with a strong rule of law system, can reduce corruption. Our results also suggest that reducing press freedom in countries without such institutions is particularly harmful. Lastly, we find that press freedom reduces voter participation yet increases foreign direct investment, suggesting that the perceptions-based measures of corruption may not tell the full story.